💌 Love Letters | Issue 33: When You Don’t Recognize That You’re Growing

My love,

There are seasons in your life when nothing feels clear, and because nothing feels clear, you assume nothing good is happening.

You wake up more irritable than usual. You cry more easily. You feel restless in your own skin. You question relationships that once felt steady. You question yourself. You might even quietly wonder if you are regressing.

And yet, this may be the very season where you are expanding.

As Alice Walker wrote, some periods of our growth are so confusing that we do not even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or depressed or hysterical, but what is actually occurring is that we are becoming larger than we were before. That line always stops me.

Becoming larger rarely feels graceful. It feels destabilizing. It feels like pressure.

When a seed begins to grow, it does not experience sunlight first. It swells in darkness. It strains against the weight of the earth. If the seed could interpret its experience, it might believe it is being buried. It might think something has gone wrong. But what is happening is that its shell can no longer contain what it is becoming.

There are moments in your life when your old identity can no longer contain you either.

What makes these seasons so deeply uncomfortable is not only the emotional intensity; it is the not knowing.

Not knowing why your tolerance for certain dynamics has changed. Not knowing why your body reacts differently than it used to. Not knowing why what once soothed you now feels hollow. Not knowing what the next step is. The mind craves a narrative, but growth often unfolds before language can catch up to it.

There are long stretches when something inside you seems to be waiting, holding its breath. You may call it stagnation. You may call it depression. You may call it failure. But what if it is incubation? What if your psyche is reorganizing itself around a new level of truth? What if the discomfort you feel is the friction of expansion?

Growth is not always luminous. Sometimes it feels like grief without a clear object. Sometimes it feels like anger because you can suddenly see where you have been small. Sometimes it feels like exhaustion because you are metabolizing years of conditioning. Sometimes it feels like loneliness because you are outgrowing rooms that once felt familiar.

And perhaps the most destabilizing part is this: the version of you that got you here cannot go where you are going.

There is a shedding involved. An identity loosening. Old coping strategies stop working. Old narratives begin to crack. You may try to force clarity, to rush the next chapter, to pressure yourself into productivity so you do not have to sit in the in-between. But the in-between is not a mistake. It is a corridor.

One day, you will look back at this season and recognize it as sacred. You will see that this was the time when you stopped abandoning yourself. This was the time when your nervous system began asking for something different. This was the time when you could no longer pretend you were small. What feels like confusion now will reveal itself as preparation. A new layer of your personality is forming quietly, below the surface.

So if you are in one of these seasons right now, let yourself be here.

You do not need to diagnose every feeling.

You do not need to fix yourself.

You do not need to turn this into a self-improvement project.

You are allowed to be in process. You are allowed to move slowly. You are allowed to trust that something wise inside you knows exactly what it is doing, even if your conscious mind does not.

You are not falling apart. You are becoming more honest. More spacious. More integrated. And that kind of growth often feels like disorientation before it feels like power.

Journal Questions 🌙

Take these gently. Let them open something rather than demand something.

1. Where in my life do I feel the most disoriented right now, and what might that disorientation be asking of me?

2. What old identity or role feels like it is loosening its grip?

3. If this season were preparing me for a new level of self-trust, what might I be learning?

4. What emotions have I been judging that could actually be signals of expansion?

5. How would I treat myself this week if I believed I was in a sacred phase of becoming rather than a period of failure?

6. What feels like it is waiting inside me, holding its breath?

If this brings up more than your body can comfortably hold, pause. Place your feet on the ground. Take a slow breath. Growth does not require force. You are allowed to go at the pace your nervous system can integrate. 

You can access it here: 

https://www.emilybrownconsulting.com/offers/vG8joKug/checkout

You are not lost. You are in preparation.

With love,

Em 💜